The Kindness of Strangers (44 page)

Sarah told J.M. what Courtney had said about hating the doctor she had as a young girl, about being afraid and ashamed. “So I guess that was just another lie, like all her others.”

J.M. asked her, “Or was that as close to the truth as she ever came to telling you?”

J.M. hadn’t known that Courtney had a child. And therefore had not known about his mother’s apparent change of heart. “The only regret I have about not coming to her funeral is that I probably would have met Courtney’s son. And if I’d known they had a child, I probably would have been here, gotten involved, tried to keep that kid safe.”

“You mean, you suspected that she’d harm Jordan?” Sarah asked.

J.M. opened his arms. “I would have assumed it. I’d met Mark. I wasn’t invited to their wedding or anything, and if I had been, I wouldn’t have gone, but I met him several times. I tried to stay in contact with Courtney. I didn’t blame
her
. I knew she was in denial, I knew she was protecting herself the only way she knew how, but I knew that Mark was a predator from the first time I met him.”

Sarah remembered charming, handsome Mark. His movie-star smile.
“How?”

“He reminded me of our dad. Even Courtney said that. And she and Mark were doing some service project with high-risk kids, all these kids who didn’t have parents around or had parents who were crack addicts or working three jobs or whatever, and these kids were always in their apartment, spending the night with them and stuff.” J.M. shook his head. “And I saw the way Mark touched these kids. It was so inappropriate. And that was
in front of me,
you know, so I could only imagine—too well, mind you—what was going on when no one else was there. And I talked to Courtney about it, but she was furious and said I was trying to wreck her life again by making up these lies. It was pretty ugly. I even went to the police but wasn’t taken seriously at all. After that she rarely had any contact with me. They even changed addresses a couple times without telling me, and I’d have to hunt them down. I guess I always held out this hope that she’d come around, have some breakthrough about her past abuse, and I wanted to be there to help her. So I just peripherally stayed aware of her and her doings. I’d Google her now and then. She accomplished a lot. I was secretly glad about her medical specialty. Relieved she wasn’t a pediatrician like our dad. I figured she was safe in obstetrics, working mostly with adults. She wouldn’t have any private contact with the infants, you know?”

Sarah was fascinated by J.M. He was married, with no children and no plans to have any. He had an organic farm on Whidbey Island, about an hour and a half away from Seattle. Bryn laughed as Sarah and J.M. went off on a long “riff”—Bryn’s word—about heirloom tomatoes.

Sarah had felt good, more hopeful, about Jordan’s future when she’d left that meeting. Here in the garden, she told Jordan most of this and assured him, “Your uncle had to go home, but he’ll come back to Ohio. He’s going to testify at your mother’s trial.”

And rather than ask any other questions about his uncle, Jordan asked, “They’re going to make me talk at her trial, too, aren’t they?”

Sarah picked up a tomato plant. “I don’t know. Has Reece talked to you about that? He was hoping that Ali’s testimony would be enough and you wouldn’t have to be there.”

“Maybe I want to go.” A slight challenge edged his voice.

“Oh.” She lowered the plant into a hole and covered its roots.

“Someone has to tell them that she didn’t want to hurt me.”

“But she did.” Sarah tried to keep the words free of judgment. They came out sounding flimsy in the bright sunlight. “Sweetie, we saw it.”

Jordan looked her right in the eye. “But that’s not—She didn’t want to do that.” Sarah looked back into his eyes. Light blue. So different from the dark eyes of her children. He seemed to believe what he said. Or had he simply mastered the façade he’d practiced so long?

She thought of the photos she’d seen Saturday night. They all blurred together for her, not like the first ones Nate had discovered. The photos of Jordan and Courtney were eclipsed by her relief that there was a reason for Danny’s behavior, something to point to, something to grasp. She tried now to bring those pictures back: Courtney had been crying, tears streaming down her face, a face more anguished than Jordan’s own.

Sarah set her trowel aside and asked, “So why did she?”

“He made her. He said she was cheating.”

“How was she cheating?”

He ducked his head and looked down at the dirt again, this time burying his other hand. His voice was quiet, almost dreamy, as if he were remembering. “She had to do it on camera, like everybody else. He said it wasn’t fair to do it when no one was watching. He—” Jordan stopped abruptly.

The sweat on Sarah’s back turned cold and clammy. “Do . . . do you mean that she made you . . . do that sometimes, even when there were no cameras? When it was just you two?”

He kept his head down.

Sarah tried to imagine that scenario. “Cheating,” indeed. How surreal, how macabre to argue about when it was “fair” to have sex with your child.

Jordan pulled his hand free from the soil and made a hard-packed dirt ball. He rolled the ball between his palms, his chin still tucked against his chest. Sarah knew he was processing what he’d just revealed. He hadn’t denied it. She knew she had to tell Reece and Kramble. And Jordan was smart enough to know this. She sat silently while Jordan rolled the dirt ball from one hand to the other. Minutes passed.

Jordan looked across the yard and said, “Maybe I did the right thing that day. Maybe it was good I got taken away from her, so she doesn’t have to worry about anything but getting well right now. See, I think, even with that disk, she might get out, don’t you?” It was the first time Sarah’d seen anything childlike and hopeful in his face, and it made her eyes well with tears. “Maybe without him around, she’d be all right, and I’d be allowed to go home.” His voice climbed higher, and he took in a ragged breath. “Do you think she’ll get out?”

Sarah answered truthfully. “I don’t know, hon.” He hadn’t asked her what she hoped for, which was more complicated. She sucked her cut lip, remembering hurling the rock at the cat. How good that had felt.

He crumbled the ball of soil in his hands and let it sift down between his fingers. He stood up and tilted his head. “Can they make her . . . better?”

She paused. This boy deserved more than sugarcoating, but she couldn’t bring herself to say no. “I don’t know.”

He looked down at his bare feet in the dirt and said quietly, “I hope so.”

“Me, too.” Sarah wasn’t lying. Part of her wished, so much it made her ache, for Courtney to be made well. For her to return as the woman Sarah had known.

And she wished for this boy to get what he wanted. For once in his life, for him not to feel cheated or betrayed or disappointed. But she only wanted this if it were the absolute right thing for Jordan to get his wish. If Courtney actually
deserved
to get him back. And Sarah hurt with her belief that no matter what rehabilitation miracles anyone came up with, she’d never be convinced that this child, any child, was safe with Courtney.

Jordan looked up at Sarah and smiled. Again he had that look of innocent optimism that changed his face completely.

“It’s hot,” he said, looking up at the sky. He pulled his T-shirt out from his neck and sniffed, then made a face. “I’m gonna go take a shower.” He walked to the gate. “Hey, Sarah? Could I—Do I . . . do I still get a tree?”

She grinned and squinted through the sun at him, blinking her burning eyes. “Sure.”

“I want the kind Nate has,” he said, pointing. He let himself out of the garden and walked up the porch steps. The back door clunked shut, and Sarah exhaled slowly.

They’d made it through another crisis, it seemed. During Jordan’s two-day silence, Lila had told Sarah, “No good deed goes unpunished, my dear.” Sarah had stiffened at the suggestion. “This is asking a lot of you,” Lila had said before she left.

Jordan did ask a lot of Sarah. He asked for more than she thought she and the boys were capable of giving. Over and over he had asked them to give more, be more for him.

And they had.

God help her, he could
not
return to Courtney.

Chapter Twenty-four
Jordan

J
ordan stood in the jail’s bright white hallway with Reece and hoped he didn’t throw up. He kept breathing funny and swallowing too much as he waited for his first visit with his mom. He wished he could visit her alone, but they had all these stupid rules, and he couldn’t even
see
her without stupid Reece being there, too. Jordan hated that Reece was allowed to listen to every word they said to each other. His fingers slid across the laminated visitor’s pass clipped to his shirt, and he wiped his hands on his jeans. Why had he told Sarah that stuff his dad said about “cheating”? Jordan had known, even as he said the words to her, that he was screwing up way worse than the first time.

It was almost his turn; he knew he’d be in the next group allowed to go to the windows and the phones. With his stomach so funky, he couldn’t tell what he really felt. He wanted to run out of this place and breathe some fresh air. But he should be happy to see her. He wanted to be like when he first saw her on the Ladens’ lawn. He’d been happy then, right? Well . . . at first, but then . . . why couldn’t he stop swallowing? This feeling reminded him of coming home from school, how he’d slip in the side door holding his breath, to find out what mood she was in, how her eyes looked, what she might do.

He realized that it had been over a month now since he’d experienced that don’t-do-anything-until-you-find-out feeling. He’d gotten used to not feeling it. Funny how that was just as easy as getting used
to
feeling it. A person could get used to just about anything. In science class Miss Holt talked about how humans adapted to their environments. A-d-a-p-t-e-d. He tried not to swallow again, but he had to.

“You okay?” Reece asked.

Jordan nodded and wiped his upper lip. It was hot in here, waiting on this stupid blue line in this stupid white hallway. And Reece had already asked him that about five thousand times. T-h-o-u-s-a-n-d. Jordan put his hand in his pocket and touched the broken wing he’d stolen from Dr. Bryn. Turns out she knew he’d taken it. She’d asked him what he planned to do with it. He didn’t know.

“We’re up,” Reece said. He touched Jordan’s shoulder to guide him forward, but Jordan shrugged off his touch. Reece didn’t react. He just pointed instead.

Jordan knew what to expect. Reece had blabbed on and on about how it would work, practically drawing a picture of it, like Jordan was two or something. There were three windows in the visiting area. The visitors sat on this side of the wall, and the prisoners sat on the other, behind thick windows. You had to talk on heavy, old-fashioned black phones—just like in the movies.

A police officer barked out names, reading off a clipboard, directing traffic as this new shift began. “Justin! Window One. Keller! Window Two. Kendrick! Window—” Jordan saw the recognition snap into the officer’s face. The officer glanced up, found Jordan, and made eye contact, which he hadn’t done for the others. Jordan felt his ears and neck burn hot as the line grew silent behind him. The officer looked curious, then sad. Jordan glared at him. “Window Three, son.”

At least Window Three was the farthest from the line. Jordan swallowed hard as he started walking, panicked that he might puke in front of all these people. The room kept going shimmery on him. Was that even a word? S-h-i-m-m-e-r-y.

Jordan sat on one of the metal seats at Window Three, just a round disk attached to the floor by a metal bar. His mom wasn’t on the other side of the glass yet, and Jordan felt bad for being relieved. Each window had two seats, and Reece sat in the other one. The way the chairs were attached to the floor, Jordan couldn’t scoot farther from Reece. A side partition on the left separated them from the visitor at Window Two. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear her. She started her conversation with, “I’m gonna kick your skinny ass, you worthless motherfucker.” Jordan was glad that to his right was a concrete wall.

He gripped the edge of the mesh countertop. M-e-s-h.
Stop it.
“Mesh” was such an easy word. Jordan wondered if it was mesh so the guard could see what you were doing with your hands. His mother’s hands flashed into his head.
No. No. Think of something else.
The counter reminded Jordan of a table you’d find in an outdoor playground. Or a table at a rest stop. Like that rest stop he and his grandma had a picnic at when she’d come to take Jordan to live with her. Back before . . . Oh, man, he really might throw up.

“Seriously,” Reece said softly. “Are you okay?”

Jordan wanted to glare at Reece again, but he was afraid if he moved his head, he’d puke. Plus, if he looked at Reece, he might cry. He didn’t know which would be worse or make him feel more like a baby. Tears pushed behind his eyes, and his lunch burned against his throat. He just stared straight ahead through the glass. And, as he did, his mother sat in the chair opposite him.

His heart stuttered in that extra beat that still startled him, and made him gasp.

He studied her face. Her skin was so pale it looked almost see-through, and her dark blue jumpsuit made every vein in her face stand out across her forehead and her throat. Her lips looked Halloween red, even though she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She ran a hand over her messy hair—it looked like she hadn’t even brushed it—then tucked it back behind her ears. She started to cry. She looked at him but didn’t really see him, he could tell.